The Good Times Are Killing Me by Lynda Barry

Young Edna Arkins lives in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing, thanks to white flight from urban Seattle in the late 1960s. As the world changes around her, Edna is exposed to the callous racism of adults—sometimes subtle and other times blatant, but always stinging. By weaving the importance of music in adolescence with the forbidden friendship between Edna, who is white, and Bonna Willis, who is Black, Lynda Barry captures the earnest, awkward, yet always honest adolescent voice as perfectly in prose as she does in comics.

Praise for The Good Times Are Killing Me

...an important read for adults who think they have packed away racism as an inevitable part of life.

Absorbing and deceptively simple, Lynda Barry’s 1988 illustrated novella is back in a new edition, and it feels like the right time. Difficult conversations about racial divides are still happening, so this story of a young girl’s friendship with a black neighbour is affecting and relevant...With sparse punctuation and breathless, run-on sentences, the story is presented with a naïve voice in a powerful way. The illustrations are stark and appropriate. It’s quite a package.

The story of two young people—Edna (white) and Bonna (African-American)—coming to terms with the inequalities of race and class... Written in the 1980s and set in the 1970s, the book remains as relevant as ever in the present.

This book is magic. Lynda Barry makes you laugh and breaks your heart all at once.

Gene Luen Yang

The beautiful reissue of Lynda Barry’s underrated autobiographical novelThe Good Times Are Killing Me, about race and falling in love with records, gets 50 pages of new art, much of it Barry’s folk-art-ish paintings of music pioneers.